"The Lenape-Allegewi War: A Native American Titanomachy" Topic

"History is teleology. We view all historical events as inevitably leading us to the here and now. The meaning of the past is derived from our end of the timeline looking backwards, as if our past selves were eternally future-oriented. When we examine the historical record we are not simply asking the innocent question of what happened, rather are making a hypothesis about how what might have happened led to this – our world, our cultures, our peculiar kind of consciousness. We may sneer at Creationists for suggesting the world is only 6000 years old, and that dinosaur fossils were placed in the ground by a trickster god to test our faith, but the argument is no less solidly teleological than any other historical proposition. We have spent all the time since the 4th Millennium B.C., when societal complexity outpaced memory, cherry-picking the written records of our forefathers in an effort to explain why today is not like yesterday, and denigrating oral traditions and half-remembered visions of the past as folklore, mythology, and anecdote. History is not forgotten, rather history is molded and smoothed, shaped to fit comfortably into the ideologies which they are circularly said to offer the justification for.

Anatomically modern humans have been loitering about the planet for about 200,000 years, and the last common ancestor for chimpanzees and humans is believed to have existed somewhere between two and ten million years ago, and the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Homo erectus (our direct genetic predecessors) seems to have appeared about a million years ago, with Neanderthals diverging from the genetic tree some mere 500,000 years ago and purportedly extinct by about 30,000 years ago (a lot of theories have us opening up a can of whoop-ass on the poor brutes). Obviously, this means that for roughly a million years, critters that were not us, but more similar to us than to chimpanzees were running around, until we brought our evolutionary A-Game and outcompeted the whole kit and caboodle. Our modern hubris about our big brains and lack of occipital bun (which if you tune in to any 24 hour news channel is somewhat overstated) maintains that critters that were like us, but not us, spent 800,000 years digging for grubs and generally exhibiting poor manners and worse hygiene, while we evolved into the superior beings that you see on the highway today. It took us 6000 years to go from scratching cuneiform on clay tablets to landing men on the moon, suggesting that the pathway from picking at fleas to civilization might just not be the arduous toil that our teleological interpretation of our own awesomeness holds it to be.

Quite conceitedly, we believe that official "history" begins at Sumer, when we started to notate tax records. If you've ever tried to write your name in Play-doh, you quickly realize that you have to be fairly serious about the endeavor to produce anything readable by someone else. Thus, the authoritative record of human history quickly became associated with whatever was deemed significant enough to merit the attentions of scribal priests. And priests tend to believe in an end game, that is, they view history teleologically. Everything leads up to the final act, the end of existence explaining each preceding moment. Therefore, we evolved with the supreme confidence that the history of the species was a steady progression from the muck to modernism, and every event is but a signpost leading inexorably to the end of time. The idea that the past is contiguous with the present has been our fundamental precept since the first God-King justified his divine rights by reference to his larger-than-life ancestors. But what if our history, rather than being a straight line progression, is actually a series of fits and starts, collapses and rises, punctuated by vague half-memories of a different existence…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Interesting essay. I appreciate the references to early (19th century) writings about the Lenape-Talega War, migration of the Lenape, Mengwe, Cherokee, etc. This war/migration hypothesis is out of fashion today and I have only found the sketchiest accounts. I'll look these sources up.

The current scientific/orthodox interpretation of the archaeology is that there was little migration east of the Mississippi in the late Woodland era, that the modern tribes developed in more or less their historical locations for many centuries.

I recently visited Cherokee, North Carolina, the main town of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation. The elders and docents who presented Cherokee history to us tourists described the Cherokees as Ani-Kituwah, the people of Kituwah-town, which they called the mother-town of the nation, just up the valley. There are the remains of big mounds at the Kituwah site, and the Cherokees certainly were a mound building people at one time who formed part of the Mississippian cultural sphere. The Cherokees have oral history recounting a civil war they fought to over-throw the Mississippian Ani-Kutani sacred chiefs, whose rule had grown oppressive. Nothing was presented of any migration from the Ohio valley or into the Tennessee valley, although I know that oral traditions of these migrations were recorded in the 19th century.

While I have great respect for the latest scientific interpretation of the physical evidence, I also respect someone who has taken the time to tell me what he knows of his family's history. If the two seem to contradict one another, I try to consider both ideas at once, perhaps not as equally plausible, but at least as both possible. We have not recovered all physical evidence, we may not have interpreted it correctly. Perhaps in a few years we will re-interpret the whole story again.

I'm sorry the author went off into fantasies about giant, proto-human Tallega mound builders. It seems that wherever in the world simple people look at big buildings, they conclude that giants must have built them. The Mycenaean-era fortresses in Greece…must have been built by the Cyclopes. Those ruined cities in the desert…the Anakim were a race of giants, sons of the sons of the gods. No puny human could have assembled the Stone Henge, not without sorcery…etc. No. Puny humans organized under a little brief authority did all these things.

There are mounds all over the Mississippi basin. Most have been destroyed, but many remain. We have dug into them and found the builders' bones. They were human, about as big as we are. The furniture in the Hall of the Giants is always sized for us.

Myths of giants can work if we are not talking about Goliaths, but bigger people. I saw this at work in Haiti. Most of the Adult males barely topped 5' and were likely under 100lbs. The Americans towered over them (on average).
I can see this as a matter of established agricultural peoples with regular and sufficient nutrition vs hunter gatherers with unpredictable nutrition. The average height of first world populations has been gradually increasing.

I think that many oral traditions will emphasize the heroic nature of victories by playing up the size and numbers of the enemies.

Bigger people are definitely giants. I am 6'1" and the tallest of my wife's family when I met them was 5'6"… many people were under 5' tall. I am HUGE compared to them.

Recently, the younger generation has grown up very tall, often taller than me. Go figure.

Anyone see the History Channel (?) or Discovery Channel (?) show of the two brothers who search for giant people?.

They have spent much money on that waste of time!(smile)

I'm big too… 1,87 and my grandfather was 1,92…

Glad you enjoyed the article Zippy!! (smile)

Amicalement
Armand